Van Der Plas, TL;
Law, S;
Pocock, MJO;
(2025)
Predicting Butterfly Species Presence from Satellite Imagery Using Soft Contrastive Regularisation.
In:
IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops.
(pp. pp. 2165-2174).
IEEE: Nashville, TN, USA.
Preview |
Text
2505.09306v1.pdf - Accepted Version Download (7MB) | Preview |
Abstract
The growing demand for scalable biodiversity monitoring methods has fuelled interest in remote sensing data, due to its widespread availability and extensive coverage. Traditionally, the application of remote sensing to biodiversity research has focused on mapping and monitoring habitats, but with increasing availability of large-scale citizen-science wildlife observation data, recent methods have started to explore predicting multi-species presence directly from satellite images. This paper presents a new data set for predicting butterfly species presence from satellite data in the United Kingdom. We experimentally optimise a Resnet-based model to predict multi-species presence from 4-band satellite images, and find that this model especially outperforms the mean rate baseline for locations with high species biodiversity. To improve performance, we develop a soft, supervised contrastive regularisation loss that is tailored to probabilistic labels (such as species-presence data), and demonstrate that this improves prediction accuracy. In summary, our new data set and contrastive regularisation method contribute to the open challenge of accurately predicting species biodiversity from remote sensing data, which is key for efficient biodiversity monitoring.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Predicting Butterfly Species Presence from Satellite Imagery Using Soft Contrastive Regularisation |
| Event: | 2025 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW) |
| Dates: | 11 Jun 2025 - 12 Jun 2025 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1109/CVPRW67362.2025.00204 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1109/cvprw67362.2025.00204 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Accuracy, Satellites, Biological system modeling, Wildlife, Predictive models, Probabilistic logic, Satellite images, Biodiversity, Remote sensing, Monitoring |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215897 |
Archive Staff Only
![]() |
View Item |

